Time for Eternity (2 page)

She managed to suck in a breath and stop the laughing. It had gotten a little hysterical. The woman watched her, curious. It took a moment for Frankie to gather herself for another shrug. “The devil … the devil got his due.”

The woman raised her brows as Frankie pointedly put the gin bottle away and wiped down the bar.
Merde.
Her hand was shaking. Then she started to think. How could a vampire be guillotined? Why not just disappear as she had seen Henri do? She glanced to the woman.

Who seemed to read her mind. “Too badly damaged to transport, perhaps. Or weakened by the sun …”

Frankie stood immobile, thinking about that. Henri so wounded he couldn ’t escape, or blistered until he was almost unrecognizable by the sun … Did anyone deserve that?

“I am Donna Poliziano,” the woman said quietly. “If ever my husband or I can do anything for you, you can find us at 430 Pine, up on Nob Hill.”

Frankie stopped in mid-wipe. “Right. Like you’d do anything for me.”

“But we would,” the vampire insisted. “San Francisco is our city. We watch over it. We would know if you were killing for what you need. But the police have found no bodies drained of blood. So you have a soul. You haven ’t gone mad in spite of your difficulties. So it is a strong soul. Those are rare.”

“Just leave me alone. That’s what I want.” Frankie wiped the same spot on the bar again.

“Ahhhh, but is it?” The woman twirled her glass, apparently thinking. Good thing she didn’t expect an answer, because Frankie wasn’t biting. Finally she reached into her evening bag and pulled out a tiny cell phone. Her face softened as she said, “Jergan, it’s Donna. Change in plans. Meet me at home?” She smiled as she listened. “You too.” She snapped it shut and stood. “Ciao, my vampire friend.”

And with that she left.

Leaving Frankie feeling … angry. What right had Donna-whoever-she-was, vampire, to come waltzing in here, flaunting the fact that she liked being a monster so much she had made a monster of a man she obviously loved? And Henri had been dead for two hundred years and there was nothing Frankie could do about it. She’d never be able to tell him how much she hated him. She felt cheated about that. And … and he might have died, not quickly as the guillotine was meant to execute people, horrible as that death was, but slowly and painfully, damaged by sun, or terribly wounded. Maybe she was angry at herself for the twinge of sympathy that evoked in her.

Frankie shook her head as though to banish all those thoughts. Time did
not
heal all wounds. But there was no way she was going to give up the callus she had grown to protect herself. It was the only thing keeping her sane.

She flipped up the portion of the bar that let her out and strode to the back room. To hell with cleaning up. Let Steve fire her.

The next night Frankie pulled off her parka and tossed it onto the coat rack for employees at the back of the small kitchen that served Ozone. She hadn’t slept all day, thinking about Henri and the vampire woman who loved her vampire husband and looked

… wise and … happy. Bitch. And that brought her back to Henri. That the Donna person thought he was a fine man was puzzling.

Maybe she was as twisted and evil as Henri. After all, she was a monster too.

Frankie was dressed as usual, in black leather pants and heeled boots. Tonight she wore a sparkly silver sleeveless sweater, knit so loosely she had to wear an ivory-colored tank beneath it. To work at a trendy bar you had to look the part. Pale was good and who more pale than a vampire? Her blond hair curled softly so she spiked it out with some gel and streaked the spikes black. She was sleekly built and good-looking and her ice-blue eyes could stare down anyone. De rigueur for a bartender in a place like Ozone.

“Frankie. Someone left a package for you.” Steve, manager-guy, dressed the part too. Expensive little suit covering his bony ass and a narrow black tie so unfashionable it was fashionable.

“Great.” She pushed past him through the chaos of the kitchen. People parted for her as they always did —aura of vampires.

That part came in handy.

Steve came up behind her. “Might want to let your friends know there’s mail service in San Francisco these days.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Who could be leaving her a package at Ozone? Or at all? She never got any mail other than catalogues and offers of free credit scores or low-cost prescription drugs.

She pushed into the din of the main room. The after-office-hours body exchange was already in full swing at six. The two guys who worked till eleven were really moving, in that economical way experienced bartenders acquired.

“Hey, Frankie. You got a package. It’s under the bar.” Ricardo had a body to die for. Too bad she didn’t indulge at work. Or at all these days.

“I heard.” She began to set out her station, making sure her preps were just where she wanted them.

“You don’t want to know what it is?”

“Not especially.”

“Shit, Frankie, curiosity has been killing me. It was delivered by
messenger.”

“Learn to live with it.” Suzie brought up an order for a big table. The night was off and running. Cripes. Didn’t people know how to order anything but Apple-tinis and Cosmos?

The bar was empty. Frankie finished cleaning up. She did an extra good job to make up for last night to the day guys. Or maybe she was putting off opening the package. She had felt it waiting for her by the soda tanks all night, no matter what she told Ricardo.

It was about the size of a thick photo album, wrapped in heavily waxed brown paper and tied with old -fashioned twine, labeled with her name in elaborate cursive script. She hesitated, then picked it up and set it on the bar. It was heavy. She poured herself a glass of Frank Family chardonnay and headed to a booth in the back, her package under her arm. Might as well relax and look at the pictures.

She settled in and tore open the wrapper. She could smell the leather binding. An envelope slid onto the table. “Open me first,” it ordered in the same calligraphy. How coy. Okay, she’d bite (no pun intended). She turned up the little lamp on the table until it cast a pool of light over the letter. The envelope was made of heavy paper, the kind that felt like it was made of rags, like in the old days, not wood pulp. Expensive. She tore it open and spread out the sheets. It was signed Donnatella di Poliziano. The woman from last night? Frankie frowned.

“My dear Ms. Suchet,” it began. How did the woman know her name? Ominous.

I know you will not seek my help. So I leave this book to you instead, as a kind of a challenge. Please reserve judgment
about what I tell you until you have read my note through and looked at the book. This is not a gift I give lightly. You are
the first person with whom I have shared my secret in nearly two hundred years. What secret, you ask? Let us begin with
the fact that time is not linear, but a vortex. It is possible to jump from one part of the vortex into another. (Remember,
you are to reserve your judgment.) My friend Leonardo built me a machine. With a vampire’s power and his genius, it is
possible to go to another time. I went back and changed a decision I regretted all my life.

You can change what happened to you too, Ms. Suchet. The machine is in Florence under the Baptistery of the Duomo.

We should have destroyed it. But it would have been like destroying part of Leonardo. We simply couldn’t bring ourselves
to do it. On the attached sheet you will find directions.

Be warned. There will be difficulties. This will be like no adventure you have ever embarked upon. But what choice have
you? This is the only way to discover what you truly want and claim it.

Do not let regret poison you, child. Have the courage to change your destiny as I changed mine. My heartfelt best
wishes go with you.

Donnatella di Poliziano

Emotions chased one another through Frankie’s belly and up into her throat. Time machine? The woman was a loon.

Yet the world held vampires. How many people would think that was crazy?

Her heart began to thump uncomfortably in her chest. What if you
could
change things, just as she had daydreamed for so many years? What if she didn’t have to be vampire?

She opened the book. The leather was supple and cared for. The sheets were vellum. That had to mean it was really old. Her Latin was a little rusty, but there was a note to Donnatella and no one could miss the signature. Leonardo da Vinci. Donna’s friend was da Vinci? Possible, if she had lived since ancient Rome. Of course the signature might not be real. The note said … that time was a vortex.
Yeah, I got that part from Donna’s letter.
She skimmed ahead. That you could think of another time and the machine would … would take you there.
Oh, right, and how was that?
And the machine couldn’t stay in the new time forever. It would slip back to its point of origin. She flipped the pages. Lots of diagrams and scribbled notes, indecipherable. It looked like the notes were written right to left, as though to be read in a mirror.

This was bullshit, of course.

Her eyes slid back to the signature. Da Vinci. He’d invented a flying machine four hundred years before the Wright brothers …

If anyone could have invented a time machine, wouldn’t it be Leonardo da Vinci?

She sat in the dim blue glow of Ozone, the open book seeming to float in the circle of brighter light on the table. What was even more stupid than this obvious hoax was that somewhere inside she wanted desperately for it to be true. This was her chance to make that daydream real. The universe was granting her one wish.

Okay, authenticate the book. If the book was real …

She’d have a decision to make.

Frankie looked up at the amazing green and white checkerboard marble of the cathedral called Il Duomo in Florence, glimmering in the streetlights. Vespers were just ending. Worshippers poured out the great bronze doors. In the streets to either side tourists were dining in the busy trattorias. Frankie still couldn’t believe she was in Italy. She’d taken the overnight flight from San Francisco to New York, and another to Paris the next night and then on to Florence on the third night. She still couldn’t avoid some daylight, what with the time changes. Sunlight burned her, though the burns it induced couldn ’t kill her. So she bundled up as though she were a strict Muslim. That caused some stares. But at least her trip was only uncomfortable, not actually shriek-inducing. She hated to admit she wanted this fantasy to be true that much.

You’re just going to look and see if it’s there.

There was no way she was going to find a time machine built by Leonardo da Vinci in the crypts under the Baptistery. So this whole journey was a stupid waste of effort.

The young woman in that tiny shop off Market Street hadn ’t looked much like an expert in old books. But the prof from Berkeley who frequented Ozone said she was. The girl confirmed the book was real and written by da Vinci. She almost didn ’t need to say it outright. The reverence in her voice after she compared the signature to known da Vinci autographs, examined the paper, tested a tiny spot of ink, said it for her. She said it was characteristic that he wrote from right to left. He was left -handed.

She’d translated passages more precisely for Frankie: the theory of how the machine worked, how he ’d built it. And his note to Donna, like a kind of preface. The note said he’d never found enough power to operate the machine. But he thought that Donna could. He knew what she was.

That still sent chills down Frankie’s spine. Vampires could call on the power of the parasite in their blood. There was a lot of it.

Frankie didn’t know exactly how much. After some hesitant early experiments, she never used her power except to run out her fangs, and then she used as little as possible, at least until this week. But she ’d seen Henri actually call power to create a whirling blackness and just … disappear. It was how vampires moved around without being seen. Handy for what she ’d been up to in Florence. And no doubt the source of the bat myth. Who knew the source of the other myths—silver and holy water, wolfsbane?

Thank God they were myths. She liked silver jewelry. And who wanted pizza without garlic?

So she left the book with the amazed girl as a gift, taking only Donna ’s note and directions with her. And here she was in Florence, just to see if this could possibly be true. Not that it could. Not that she’d do anything if it were.

Who was she kidding? If she didn’t intend to use the machine if she found one then why had she used her power to disappear and reappear inside a hospital supply room to steal enough morphine to float a ship? She had never dared to use her power in that way before. And why had she bought clothes that might be mistaken for 1794? Waisted, full-length skirt in revolutionary blue, flat leather slippers, and an off-the-shoulder red blouse with a white scarf looking very much like a fichu. Let’s not forget the fact that she’d gone back to her natural blond curls, sans spikes. They might very well be mistaken for hair arranged
à l’enfant,
as she’d worn it so long ago.

There should be no lying to herself. She’d bought a replica of a gladiator’s sword and it was packed, along with a change of clothes, in a leather gym bag that had cost her a fortune at the Hermes store. The very concept of using it on Henri caused a shudder in her. Could she
do
this? She bit her lip. She wouldn ’t have to do anything. There was no time machine under the Baptistery.

Yet she’d bought Canadian maple leaves and South African Krugerrands at a precious metals exchange because she ’d need currency good even in 1794, and nothing was easier to exchange than gold.

No, there was no question about what she was going to do if she found some kind of a machine under the Duomo’s Baptistery.

Or about how much she wanted it to be there.

She moved through the stream of worshippers to the cobbled pavement outside the cathedral. Across an open plaza the ornate octagonal Baptistery rose. She slipped inside the great bronze doors and slid into the shadows of one of the marble columns that marched around the perimeter in pairs. She hadn’t been in a church in two hundred years. Priests moved quietly about dousing lamps, signaling the visitors that it was time to leave. Soon only the many candles to the right of the altar shed their flickering light across the intricately tiled floor. To other visitors the amazing dome covered with mosaics in medieval glory and liberally doused with gilt would be lost in shadow. But Frankie could see it clearly, along with the statues lining the upper gallery whose bases held the relics of the saints they portrayed. The remaining priest looked around and, thinking the Baptistery empty, slipped out a side door.